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Agnew's glib and misleading linkage of liberals with radicals, his equally glib identification of conservatism with the center has a clear meaning. It illustrates the fact that the battle is not only political but ideological. Political control of the Senate goes by party label. If a majority of Senators call themselves Republicans, that party controls the committees and thus the power to dam or release the flow of legislation, to schedule or not to schedule hearings, to act or not to act. With political control, conservatives and liberals of the same party are drawn together in common cause.
Much as he thirsts for political control, the President's overriding aim is for an ideological majority. Hence the incessant cry that the Senate needs rescue from radic-libs. Southern conservative Democratic Senators are not fired upon; Republican liberals have pointedly been excluded from the Administration's campaign roles.
By chance, only one fully accredited Republican liberal—New York's Charles Goodell—is seeking re-election this year. Through Agnew, who has attacked Goodell and raised funds for his Conservative Party opponent, the President has made clear his willingness to sacrifice a card-carrying Republican for someone more ideologically in tune with the Administration. Apart from Goodell, the insistence on ideological purity has greater practical significance for the future. Such Republican liberals as Charles Percy, Mark Hatfield and Edward Brooke, whose terms expire in 1973, undoubtedly perceive the warning signal: if necessary, Nixon is prepared to sacrifice even Republican liberals to alter the character of the Senate. Conservative Robert Dole of Kansas does nothing to allay such apprehensions when he says: "The liberals in the Senate are still important, but they're not the key votes." Then Dole muses: "If we get more conservatives, we wouldn't need them as bad."
To understand the Senate's present role, it is necessary to go back to the waning years of the Eisenhower era, when the Senate "class of 1958" was elected on a wave of recession discontent. The class contained a cadre of liberal Democrats, many from conservative states, who tilted the overall ideological cast of the Senate to the liberal side. They were returned in the Goldwater debacle of 1964, and for twelve years they have, in the main, cast their votes for Medicare, civil rights, voting rights, federal aid to education, increased minimum wages, the war on poverty, the nuclear test-ban treaty, the Peace Corps, federal rent subsidies, open housing. They provided the votes that enabled Lyndon Johnson to say, with less hyperbole than he regularly employed, that the Congress of 1964 "met more national needs . . . than any other session of this century or the last."
Most of the liberals later turned against Johnson for his Viet Nam policies, and they have not let up on Nixon. They were outraged at the invasion of Cambodia, led moves to fix a firm withdrawal date for U.S. troops in Indochina, opposed the anti-ballistic missile system (which survived in the 1969 Senate by only one vote), rejected Nixon Supreme Court Nominees Clement Haynsworth Jr. and G. Harrold Carswell.
The Nature of Combat
The issues this year do not turn on specific legislation, but on the worries and fears that roil the